Today’s journey is about Internet marketing magic.

We start magically enough discussing PPC and money. Money isn’t money anymore. Money floats. Money is a VOTE for or against something. How can money be a vote against something? When you don’t make any of it. After a strange daydream driving to the office on a rainy and finally cold day in February I wanted to write about how being an Internet marketer and curator over the last twelve years has changed my thinking.

There is a problem knowing truth. Humans are dynamic systems with billions of social and biological inputs. How do we KNOW such a complex system?  In a Black Swan world do we ever know the truth? Wrong question asked in the wrong way for Internet marketers.

The web is magic. One of my favorite tools, Scoop.it, spiders the web based on keywords helping curate across many topics (see Curation Revolution on Sccop.it). Let’s see if we can find or understand Internet marketing magic further.

Internet Marketing and PPC Magic
Several years ago, determined to understand the unknowable, I experimented with Google Pay Per Click (PPC), the most immediate direct feedback system. I manipulated Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) up and down. First I moved standard ROAS from our default $3 to $1 to $6 to $1. Here is what happened:

• Internal P&L for PPC got healthy even fully loaded we made money on PPC ($3 to $1 was close to breakeven)
• Organic search (SEO) fell out of bed crashing and halting progress where we were climbing and sending existing #1’s down the page
• Catalog subscriptions tanked – our “B” conversion point was joining our email list for the “best deals” and we cut new names into the list by half
• YTD (year to date) vs. LYTD (last year to date) Sales Tanked – since PPC ROAS of $3 to $1 was in the history I was comparing against upping the ROAS to $6 to $1 hurt sales by about 30%
• Despite cleaning up our PPC profits and losses net impact of the move up to $6 to $1 was negative costing more than we saved by a large margin

Our next experiment was to move ROAS down to $1 To $1. Here is what happened:

• Internal P&L looked UGLY, fully loaded we lost a lot of money on almost every sale, but we were making it up in volume (little inside joke there since this month of almost $1 to $1 almost cost me a job)
• Organic search got better but wasn’t covering the differences due to SEO’s slow uptick (organic can be behind by as much as 90 days as spiders and links catch up) AND PPC doesn’t really help with link bait – the most important SEO lure
• Catalog subscriptions were up but they didn’t triple (figure our standard ROAS was $3 To $1 so catalogs and sales should triple if there was a one to one relationship between ROAS and either metric – there isn’t a one to one relationship between ROAS and anything so don’t look for it)
• Sales Improved but didn’t triple, sales almost doubled

Point of Diminishing Financial Returns
There is  always a point of diminishing returns, the place where putting in or taking out more only hurts. Our standard $3 to $1 ROAS kept internal P&L healthy. $3 to $1 ROAS was as close to a one to one relationship anything on the web ever becomes. We fed PPC at $3 to $1 ROAS and good things happened across multiple dimensions and, even better, we almost paid for the PPC investment on its face (i.e. without any help from other channels), almost.

Feeding other systems such as sales, email list subscriptions, white paper downloads, requests for product demos, traffic, time on site, pages viewed and lowering bounce rate is PPC’s purpose, its raison d’ être. Eventually more diversified competitors win because:

1. Customer acquisition costs are lower in aggregate for well diversified Internet marketers so they can afford to drive PPC bids up to a pain threshold forcing other less diversified Internet marketers to retire from the field
2. Since PPC is only one of many feeder systems for well diversified Internet marketers if PPC tanks well diversified Internet marketers have other options such as email, social, and mobile while less hedged competitors go out of business (and believe me PPC tanks on occasion for strange and undetermined and undeterminable reasons)
3. The forward momentum of PPC is seconds, turning PPC off turns traffic off like a light switch. Organic listings, in contrast, can last years. My Content Marketing Networks presentation on Slideshare was #1 for years, slipped to #2 recently but a nice run for a very long time.

Modeling Dynamic Systems
The terms “weather forecasting” and “weather prediction” tell a lot. Use of “forecasting” and “prediction” speak to a complexity beyond 2 + 2 = 4 linear modeling. Weather is highly dynamic or full of Bursts to use Notre Dame network researcher Albert-Laszlo Barabasi’s term from his book Bursts: The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do.

Don’t think your website is burst-y? Here is a traffic chart from ScentTrail Marketing my blog:

Here is a graph I used in Content Curation Magic and Contest:

See the similarity.

ScentTrail Marketing creates a wave, a series of bursts.  My pattern is a burst followed by quiet. I have a great day job so don’t have as much ScentTrail content creation time as before.

Here’s the rub, all websites NOT led by brilliant, algorithm-creating Internet marketers are burst-y. Now look at the government’s chart for Amazon’s growth in ecommerce from my SEO and The Amazon Paradox post for my friend Bill Ross’s excellent LinchpinSEO site:

NOT BURST-Y

I can hear the 2 +2ers out there thinking this chart shows money not content so of course it is smooth. Amazon’s money chart serves as a proxy for all other charts such as traffic, conversion or acquisition. Amazon’s chart is also a perfect example of the first law of content marketing for Internet marketers: More and More, Faster and Faster, Better and Better.

Amazon’s chart is smooth because the most amazing content creation engine the world has ever known isn’t burst-y. Amazon is built to make Google happy generating more and more content, faster and faster, better and better. Amazon’s content creation process is THE key to great Internet marketing. Amazon will reach 1B pages in Google’s index by August, around the same time Facebook crosses the 1B subscriber mark.

More and More
If you aren’t watching Google page spread using a tool or the site:YOURSITE.com command then your marketing team is missing one of the three legs of Internet marketing. All Internet marketing sits on a three-legged-stool of CONTENT, COMMUNITY and CAMPAIGNS leading to CONVERSION. The Internet marketing stool is business model agnostic (B2B or B2C).

Faster and Faster
Google CEO Eric Schmidt supplied one of my favorite stats. We create as much content now in two days as from the cave until 2003. Every two days we create the same amount of as in MILLIONS OF YEARS. Moore’s Law states integrated circuit power will square every two years even as costs go way down. You don’t have to look very far to see Moore’s Law’s impact (Google, Facebook, Amazon). Expect more speed faster. Compare Moore’s Law chart showing the gain in integrated circuit power to Amazon’s smooth rise and the relationship becomes clear:

Better and Better
Google created PageRank, named after founder Larry Page, to index the web. Google’s bot establishes a score from 0 to 10 for every web page. Google does not and will probably NEVER index every web page; Linked: How Everything Is Connected To Everything Else And What It Means also by Barabasi shares that only about 2/3rds of the web will ever be in any search engine index.

Before reading Linked I used to tear hair out over my Google page count. Our site had over 10,000 pages, but our Google page count rarely moved about 5,000. Our “lost pages” were probably Google knocking pages out because they weren’t unique, well linked or both. Other “lost pages” float in a Sargasso Sea moving slowing further out never reaching Google’s shores. Isolated, unlinked and alone these un-indexed pages are NOT what any Internet marketer wants.

“Better and Better” is only partially what you do. Better is mostly about what others think about what you do. “Voting” on “better and better” takes many forms including traffic, LINKS and Facebook LIKES. This means any Internet marketer’s job is creating content capable of springing legs and walking around the world.

Modeling Dynamic Systems – The Cool Psychedelic Part of Internet Marketing
Ken Kessey and the Merry Pranksters (c. 1964) were Internet marketers before there was an Internet to market:

The psychedelically painted bus had its stated destination as being “further.” This was the goal of the Merry Pranksters, a destination that could only be obtained through the expansion of one’s own perceptions of reality. They traveled cross-country giving LSD to anyone who was willing to try it (LSD was legal in the United States until October 1966). Wikipedia

I inject the sixties for more than a smile; the Pranksters idea of “further” as a process rather than destination is prescient. Systems as dynamic, diverse and alive so the Internet require different processes, different ways to understand what those dynamic Internet and web systems are trying to tell us. Weather turns quickly. Here is a quote new friends at CurationSoft helped me recover:

“I’ve seen tornadoes roar up on dusty Texas plains. I’ve run from a black storm’s vengeance, furry and terror. No Texas tornado has anything over the content storm heading at each and every one of us.”

Curation The Next Web Revolution on ScentTrail Marketing

Collapsing Content Network Space/Time
We’ve arrived at our “further” for today. What occurred to me driving to work listening to Jim Stengel, a fellow P&G alum, speak about VALUES in his excellent book GROW: How Values Power Growth and the Good To Greatness of them is the web and the wisdom of crowd system the Internet creates requires a new value system, a paradigm shift. Valuing new metrics and web paradigms is NOT to say core values don’t begin any Internet marketer’s (or content curator’s) journey since establishing values is THE KEY first step.  The way we THINK is what we lucky few Internet marketers control. A wise and smart friend, Rich Kurnik, once told me, “If we can’t change something that seems uncontrollable change YOURSELF, change your thinking and feelings about it.”

Rich’s idea perfectly describes the mental paradigm shift necessary to become a GREAT Internet marketer. Here is my attempt to build on Rich’s wisdom:

Hope today’s journey was magical, if not tomorrow is sure to be because Internet marketing is getting more and more magical faster and faster.

Martin
—-
Martin Smith (@ScentTrail)
Director Marketing

Martin’s Ecommerce Copy Writing Secrets
There is an important trick to writing great ecommerce copy – remember your TWO “readers”. Copy on an ecommerce web site is read by search engine spiders and people and the first one (spiders) catches the second (people) in its web. Here is the rub – you ecommerce copy is constrained by mutually exclusive ideas such as:

Free SEO Evaluation White Paper (coming soon)

Look for the Atlantic BT SEO White Paper soon. Today’s post shares SEO Tips prompted by a customer who successfully made SEO low hanging fruit changes and is looking to move his web site to the next level.

SEO – Martin’s Tips Note

SEO is a many layered challenge with touch points in site design, site reputation, viral campaigns, PPC (as a traffic generator and source of content research), hosting (site speed is becoming an increasing issue), meta data (particularly page titles), keyword aligned body copy and about fifty other things. We’ve seen tremendous SEO change in the last two years due to the growing influence of social networks. Diving into the middle of such a many layered challenge takes skill, time and a solid understanding of your site and business goals. Here are “best practices” you can implement in your site today to improve organic traffic:

• Facebook Likes (macro and micro) – Be sure to have the Facebook LIKE button on your home page and on important individual pages such as product pages or key articles AND make sure your counters are accurate to the page the LIKE button is on. I want a macro “reach” counter capable of summarizing LIKES across multiple touch points, but no such tool exists yet (that I am aware of) so make sure your Facebook counters are aligned to pages they are on.

• Platforms Beat Websites – read my Internet Marketing – Platforms vs. Websites post on ScentTrail Marketing to understand how significantly Internet marketing is being transformed by Web 2.0 and the promise of Web 3.0. As Amazon nears a billion pages in Google’s index understanding the interconnected “platform-yness” of Internet marketing has never been more important.

• UGC Rules – One of the implications of living in the land of platforms is you can’t create enough content to win keyword wars on your own. You team and content creation budget isn’t big enough even if you have millions. User generated content (UGC) is KEY. Create campaigns that develop community and encourage people to share your site across their social nets (and remember to use the Facebook LIKE button whenever possible). You may want to read my 1:10:89 Rule post too as it explains how magical and rare contributors are. My favorite UGC tools are polls, contests and games. Each UGC tactic has a “best practice” application I will write about in another post.

• Content, Community and Campaigns THEN Conversions – Living in a platform time means learning SEO stepping stones to success. Each step builds on and contributes to the next. Create a content strategy. We create content strategies with extensive keyword research, something we’ve named ”branding keywords”. Branding Keywords maps keywords to business values, buying personas, buyer pain points and potential blue oceans (those keywords not frothy red with competition). This kind of research is a HUGE time commitment (days usually), but it makes your content and campaigns jump off the page. We are working on sharing these steps so anyone who wants to can “brand keywords” (look for our tutorial in about a month). Community can be as little as adding reviews or as much as building out a Facebook environment. Content without community support is a tree falling in the desert with no one to hear it. Campaigns are the “buy one get one free” or the “free white paper” or the “Holiday Sale” language of email and social marketing. You need deadlines, a great offer and compelling presentation across all touch points (site, blog, social, email) to motivate and cut through clutter and buyer apathy. Conversions come because you fire on every step. Any friction such as TRUST and REPUTATION must be fully eliminated (another post for another time). Conversions Key Performance Indicators can be anything including more time on site or increased page views. We like to make conversions some ACTION such as sign up, download or buy.

• SPEED – Go to Alexa or use a speed evaluation tool. If your site is anything other than FAST redesign it or serve it better or both. Google’s margins erode when pages take too long to load so they will punish your listings for slow response.

• SPAM – Work in SEO long enough and you can feel hidden SPAM traps. You know exactly how to SEO write to push keyword density without spamming. There are tools that you can use to confirm and help eliminate things like “stop words”, but do this long enough, test enough content and you develop an intuitive feel for what works. If you don’t have such a sense yet read my SEO Writing Tips 1 – 5 on ScentTrail Marketing for a quick crash course.

• DATA – We are constantly reminded that however much we think we know about SEO we don’t know anything. SEO and the Internet live organically in Real Time. The only things that matter or define SEO success is what is happening now. The good news is there is a sea of data to help cut the cost of the gamble. SEO and Internet marketing are always gambles, but informed ones perform better and better over the long run. Every now and again we re-read Black Swan by Taleb just in case we think we can finally predict Internet marketing’s future (no one can and arrogance goes before a huge fall in our Internet marketing experiences).

• Snake Oil – In another much younger life I sold soap for P&G, an honorable straight forward job. SEO is full of people who project confidence when they should have NONE. They use words they don’t understand but do so in a way that makes listeners confused or anxious. Here is a quick Snake Oil test. Ask a prospective SEO how they would change your home page title, the most important meta copy on any page. If they answer anything other than, “I have no idea,” RUN FOR THE HILLS. Existing sites are modeled and indexed in Google. Change is expected and accepted WITHIN parameters, within modeled limits. First rule of SEO is DO NO HARM. Anyone who, at a moment’s notice, creates a SEO plan for your site is dangerous and should be avoided. Avoid snake oil salesmen since the first rule they violate is DO NO HARM and harm within Google’s Elephant Memory Brain is forever (or a very long time anyway). Another good Snake Oil test is anyone who says, “I can get you #1 on X keyword in Y time.” The only way to achieve such a mission is to wear a black hat, to game or trick Google. Never game or trick Google. The math always wins and the over/under doesn’t favor such a tactic (what you stand to gain vs. lose). A former CFO told me, “I want you to make something happen on Google by the end of the week.” Something is happening on Google all the time, I had to explain, but only BAD things can happen for sure by the end of the week. Hard concept for a CFO to grasp.

Keep the faith, keep creating content and find a way to move your “site” to a platform generating UGC and the magic Google Juice it provides is the most important SEO lesson once you are past the low hanging fruit of solid meta, body copy, tags and purple cow link bait.

Hope these ideas have helped. Look for our Free SEO White paper and more on Branding Keywords soon. If you would like to be kept up-to-date with the latest at Atlantic BT (never share our list and don’t spam) use the link below to stay in touch.

Yes, Please Add Me To Your Think Like An Internet Marketer Email List.

Martin
Director Marketing

Suggested Reading:

Phil Simon’s new book

The Age of the Platform

@lindzie Lindsay Wassell Partner and Consultant, KeyPhraseSEOlogy

Commentary:

Notes:

Create great news content and you can compete with main stream news media if you have expertise in that space.  It is easier to rank a video as opposed to entering a simple web page.

Images get great rankings, make sure you have a file name, alt tag and text around the image.  Use images in News articles, places pages, and use Panoramio.  Look for any opportunity to add rich media types as they will increase your rankings.

Google Local – if you have brick and mortar locations you absolutely must in local listings and encourage and manage reviews.  Local Places page you can add photos, videos, description, categories and address.

David Mihm’s Local Search Ranking Factors is a great resource for using Google Local.

Microdata = Rich Snippets – all the search engines got together and set standards for classifying information.  Microdata (the date about data) is really important for rankings.  Check out Schema.org for examples of this.  Music microdata can be used to have links in search results directly to songs.

Products can be tagged using microdata to make them show up in a different way so it shows the reviews.

Info on Rich Snippet resources can be viewed on http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/topic.py?topic=21997.

Key Takeaways:

1. Expand your view of Search Marketing
2. Explore new content types and find ways to expand
3. Identify your content with microdata to help it shine in the SERPs.
4. Think beyond the web page

Next Generation SEO: Beyond Best Practices

@michaelmarshall Michael Marshall SEO Guru

Commentary:  The brunt of this one and its discussion of the Power Law did go over my head, but it was interesting from how this is used to generate traffic.  Personally I think he had too much content in his slides and moved too quickly so it was difficult to digest and get any true takeaways from the session.

Notes:

This is important because traffic leads to sales.

On-page Optimization has to do with Title Tags, Meta tags, ALT tags, Header tags, URL structure, anchor text, Keyword proximity is more important than Keyword density.

The Key to navigating through all of the methodology is MATH.

The Key benefit is to get the data so that you connect it to a mathematical model to create understanding.

More often than not your competitors have changed something that improved their rankings.  Don’t change too much at once on your site when it comes to SEO so you can track what you have changed.

StatistiXL is a great product for evaluating your SEO performance to do the work using Math as opposed to trial and error you will save money over time.

Make Your CMS Work for Your SEO, Not Against You

@markusrenstrom Markus Renstrom, Head of SEO Yahoo!

Commentary: The big take away here for me that the SEO team of your company needs to own how new pages are created to make sure they conform to a template that can be re-used to save money.

Notes:

It makes sense to have quality over quantity and you need to focus on your platform that you are going to use to get good SEO rankings.

Concept #1 – Expectations – If you work in search you need to educate your company on what they can expect from the results.  Markus spent time talking about what SEO is not.  SEO takes time, strategy and investment and not more links.

SEO is a long term Content Strategy.  50% of people are using 3 or more keywords to search now.  You also need to make that content accessible to everyone.  Search engines disable all of the javascript so that it can search through the content.

Think about who is the top user to your site?  Is the search engine your top user because they will actually look at everyone one of your pages.  SEO is about User Focused content.

Concept #2 Ownership – ownership created agility, enables standardization and automation, and it saves time and resources. If you create standards to tags and Urls it gets faster to create content.

Duplication is your enemy.  Your one article should not exist in more than one category. Dynamic URLs are scary from a search perspective.

The importance of tagging cannot be underestimated especially around the coverage of titles and well formed anchor tags.

Yahoo’s traffic is up even though they have reduced the number of pages by 40%.

Yahoo has its own content management system.

Next Level SEO: Social Media Integration

@bill_slawski Bill Slawski, President CEO, SEO by the Sea

Commentary: You should be teaching your clients about relevance of social in search results because they are the subject matter experts.

Notes:

Google has reacted to the advent of social media to show fresher more relevant content.

Bill brought up several sites that failed fast and hard like Dodgeball.com, Google Answers, Google opensocial, Googlevark, Google hotpot was integrated into Google places, Google SearchWiki, Google Wave, Google Buzz.  All of these have been shed and some parts are now being incorporated into Google Plus.

Real Time Search is what is changing.  The recent earthquake is great example of this.  Address recency-sensitive queries are starting to drive results from social media.  The results cannot be ranked the same way that normal web pages are ranked.  When you interact with Google Plus you are building a type of ranking system that will help results with your +1 activity.

Google Plus of course is now showing up in search results.  Authorship markup standards are now published by Google that will show your Google+ posts and your author picture to have richer content.  Authorship markup is difficult but uses the aforementioned mircodata from schema.org.  All Blogspot and YouTube contributions automatically incorporate authorship markup.  Google is using a contribution score to control how the markup is displayed in results.

Why Google+?  Well we should be using it because of the access to all the collateral data that they have access to.  Teach our clients on how to social network instead of networking for them.

Google caused a stir in the Internet a couple weeks ago. Google announced that they would encrypt the search sessions of users signed into Google accounts (also called SSL or secure socket layer encryption.) Why would Google do this? That’s a great question. This question is creating heated Is Google Good Or Evil debates all around the web (read my colleague Brian Chiou’s Google Good Or Evil article for his take).

What does SSL Encryption really mean?

SSL encryption means search queries and search results are private. Search results are only visible and accessible to the individual user on the other end of the computer (or phone)…well, AND to Google of course.

Did search engine optimization get harder?

Yes, since search engine optimizers lost the ability to identify keywords searched for a large portion of web traffic. SSL encryption means Internet marketing analysts can’t tie a keyword searched to a goal (or conversion) on a website for users signed into their Google Account.

Were we spoiled with free access to such valuable information in the past?

Google’s decision to limit analysis comes as a blow. SSL encryption isn’t Google’s first paradigm shift and won’t be their last. But why would Google cloak something we are used to knowing? Something we used to help clients optimize content for search marketing?

Google says in their official blog that they want to “make search more secure”:

As search becomes an increasingly customized experience, we recognize the growing importance of protecting the personalized search results we deliver. As a result, we’re enhancing our default search experience for signed-in users.

Is Google really concerned about our privacy? I just looked up my house in Google Earth. There is my car sitting in the driveway. I could zoom and see me sitting on the couch watching TV. Security? Really?

Google says they will continue to pass across secure socket layer data for those using Google’s advertising platforms. SSL encryption only affects organic (non-paid) search results. The lesson here: Pay the price and Google will giftwrap keywords, tie a bow around them and drop them in your lap.

Not convinced money is at the bottom of Google’s SSL encryption?

SSL kills retargeting, the practice of showing ads related to recently visited sites. Retargeting works for old advertising reasons. Retargeting works because repetition works. Retargeting works because customers think serendipity when a massive, intelligent, invisible hand sends subliminal messages and influences free will. Leaving aside the used car salesman feel to retargeting for another post, Google killed retargeting because of how this marketing tactic impacts search. Retargeting reduces search volume. Reduce search volume and Google’s PPC money takes a hit. Money–not security–is at the bottom of Google’s SSL encryption change.

Does Google have something else up their sleeve?

The answer to that question is always YES. Are they prepping us for a paid tool that will allow access to this valuable data? Is Google pushing us to pay for data to improve their $10 billion revenue (from last quarter alone)? Answer: YES.

Or is Google responding to a security backlash? An “adbusters-like” attack on retargeting? Is Google taking steps to improve their privacy policy to benefit the end user? Like most things Google, the answers to all of these questions and many more is always YES. Personally I will believe in the divine Goodness of the “do no evil” company when my house isn’t so easily accessible from any cell phone, iPad or computer on earth.

So, where do we go from here?

As Internet Marketing Specialists, SSL encryption means we have our work cut out for us. We need to be creative in how we collect, analyze and report with our new search engine marketing (SEM) reality. Our Internet marketing world is challenged once again. But who isn’t up for a good challenge?

We say bring it on, Google. We’ll adapt. We’ll figure out ways to help clients understand your new SSL world as we’ve figured out all the other new worlds you’ve created. You’ll make us better Internet Marketers because of it. So thank you Google. I knew I loved you for a reason.

What is Google Boost?

Google Boost is a new advertising platform that Google has begun to roll out to all industries across all cities in the world.  In short, the platform allows you to pay for placement at the top of the page when an individual searches for a keyword that matches your industry. In the example shown below, you will notice the individual has typed “Asian restaurants San Francisco.”

The Business Case

Another way Google Boost can help (or hurt)

If you take a better look at the Google Boost ad, you will notice five yellow stars. By now, most Internet users are familiar with the yellow stars and can quickly associate that with reviews. The following report performed by Kudzu.com tries to show how important consumer-generated media (CGM or in layman terms reviews) really is.

When 600 users were surveyed in December 2008:

86% of shoppers said product evaluations and reviews influenced their purchasing decisions.

Of those 3,000 conversion focused users, 2,820 – 2,910 are searching online for your product / service before setting foot into your store. Of the 2,820 – 2,910 visitors 2,425 – 2,502 are allowing reviews to influence their purchasing decision.

So, if you start getting reviews that are negative it may be wise to hire someone who takes care of your online reputation management. It is also a good move to give some perk to customers who choose to give your business feedback / review online.

Why Google Boost then for this audience segment?

I would like to expand on point #6 because it is 100% necessary to have one when targeting online shoppers. In the previously shown screenshot,  the UVP is that they use, farm-fresh ingredients.

Let’s assume the example business we own is a car repair shop. There are five competitors who will most likely rank within the top half of the Google page when the user searches for “car repair in Raleigh.”  Having your Google Boost ad say, “Car Repair Shop located in Raleigh.” is less effective than delivering a clear UVP such as, “Car Repair Shop with Competitor Price Matching.”

Oh…nobody trusts pay-per-click…right?

Takeaways

• If you are a local business who relies on customers, I’d recommend getting started today.
• The pay per click market is growing. Google Boost is similar to a pay per click system and I maintain that it will have a high chance of growing alongside that market or turning into pay per click altogether.
• The majority of people making purchases are doing research online for local shops prior to the trip to the location.
• Have a Unique Value Proposition ready if you want to create a Google Boost advertisement.

Please feel free to comment with any questions or counter points.

There’s no way around it: search engine spiders love words, and so you’re going to have to find a lot of fresh ones if you’re going to make it to the top. As easy as it is to say we’re going to come up with a new blog post every few days, the reality is that the task leaves most of us just the way we were in high school – putting off our writing assignments until later, or even skipping them altogether.

Without fresh content, however, your online business is bound to get a failing grade. Here are a few steps you can take to keep your search engine efforts moving forward:

1. Make SEO a priority.

If adding material to your site becomes just another in a long list of “to-do’s,” it’s very unlikely to ever actually get done.  Finding your way to the top of the search engine rankings for a profitable keyword is akin to trying to move your business onto one of the busiest streets in the world, and achieving that goal takes time and effort.  Try to keep that perspective and let it motivate you to post more.  Unless SEO is a major goal for your business, it’s probably not going to get the attention it deserves.

2. Set realistic goals.

By trying to write too much material, or gather too many pieces of information in a short amount of time, you aren’t being ambitious, you’re setting yourself up for failure.  Like the dieter who vows to never taste chocolate again, the marketer who sets a goal of writing three articles a day is only kidding themselves.  Setting achievable goals isn’t just less stressful; it’s more productive.

3. Stick to schedule.

Once you’ve established a plan you can live with, you have to stick to it.  Pencil in your SEO time the same way you would an important meeting.  Even if it’s just fifteen minutes a day to spend writing or finding resources, it’s critical that you do it and keep moving forward.  It’s easy to get so swept away with day-to-day business issues that you forget, but it only takes a little lost momentum to throw your plan off track.

4. Get organized.

You should have some sort of log or spreadsheet that shows what topics and keywords you’ve worked with, as well as which ones you plan to add to in the future.  Filling it in can provide you with valuable focus and motivation during those times when you’d rather not bother with writing or posting material, as well as making sure you don’t duplicate your efforts.

5. Pay attention.

Sometimes the market changes – people begin searching for new answers, leading to an entirely different set of core keywords for your SEO plan.  That doesn’t have to mean you abandon your efforts, but it might indicate that you should alter your approach.  You can’t make that determination, however, if you’re not paying attention to what your customers are thinking and talking about.

6. Track your results.

Some business owners get so caught up in the doing part of SEO that they neglect to check and see if it’s actually working.  Keep tabs on how many visitors your pages are tracking, how long people are staying to read or shop, which keywords are drawing the most sales, and so on.  You can’t build an effective campaign without feedback, so keep your ear to the ground, virtually speaking.

7. Keep an idea file.

It’s very hard to just sit down and add content to your website out of nothing. That’s why it’s a good idea to keep a notebook or computer file where you can record thoughts for upcoming topics. Then, when you need one, you’ll have inspiration at your fingertips.

8. Practice patience.

SEO, like most marketing practices, is a slow science.  It can take weeks or months to work, not days.  Realize that from the outset and plan your business accordingly.  The orders might not start flying in overnight, but if you follow the right steps and add lots of fresh new content to your site, it will pay off in a big way.

Sticking to your search engine optimization plan might feel like a chore, but if you can follow these tips and keep your site constantly updated, you’ll eventually learn why so many companies love it.  Coming up with content isn’t always easy, but writing on your site is like writing a check to yourself in the future.

As wonderful as that dynamic is, however, it’s not always so straightforward to achieve in the real world. For example, some pages fail to convert a high enough percentage of visitors to make money or prices and trends change so quickly that they force the marketer or business owner to move in a new direction. An even greater obstacle is finding sufficient numbers of visitors in the first place, especially in a way that makes the effort cost-effective. It’s no use bringing in hundreds or thousands of fresh buyers if you are losing money on transactions.

Because of this, many companies focus on bringing ever-greater amounts of traffic to their sites. Their reasoning is sound, at least at first glance: find enough new prospects, and you are bound to close at least some of them.

Be very careful with that assumption. As important as search engine optimization and marketing programs are, it is not hits, impressions, or page views that add digits to your bottom line – it’s sales. Here are a few things to keep in mind as you consider your online marketing strategy:

Consider your audience

If you post about things people care about, then they’ll come to read or look at what you’ve put online. Marketing in a way that speaks to your audience isn’t exactly groundbreaking, but it’s becoming more vital than ever in a climate where so many companies are trying to blast customers with too many messages and ideas.

If you’re ever in doubt about what’s on your customers’ minds, there’s a simple solution: ask them. Often, it takes very little (in the way of money or programming time) to add a forum or feedback section, but taking that small step can yield you quite a bit of insight into the minds of the men and women who are buying from you. Use it to take their pulse now and again, and then add content that speaks to their hopes, concerns, and needs.

Think quality, not quantity

Probably the biggest sin marketers make online in focusing too much on traffic statistics is trying to cram more pages, articles, blog posts, and other updates than they can manage and still maintain a certain level of quality and originality. It’s the old spaghetti approach: throw enough keywords against the wall, and some should stick.

Unfortunately, marketing hardly ever works that way – online or off. People read, visit, and shop on the websites they do because they find them to be helpful, informative, or entertaining, not because they care what’s tucked into the page header or embedded links. For that reason, it makes a lot more sense to add to your site the way you would a gourmet dinner, letting quality ingredients simmer together rather than dashing everything on the plate at once.

Get specific

In recent years, it’s become popular to talk about “long tail” searches and keywords, and for good reason – they offer the best of all possible business worlds. Because they’re more specific, they give marketers the opportunity to focus their efforts on one or two small areas and dominate them with relatively little effort. And, as an added bonus, long tail terms generally convert a much larger percentage of visitors than their more general, more expensive counterparts.

The toughest part of executing a long tail strategy, for most companies, isn’t in making it work, but finding the right phrases to start with in the first place. It doesn’t have to be difficult, though; just think of what it is your business does better than any other and begin with that. From there, a good web design firm or online marketing professional should be able to help you find the right keyword combinations, not to mention track the results.

Traffic is important to online sales, but bringing in visitors doesn’t automatically mean that you’re going to start making more money. In order to convert viewers into buyers, you need to find the right ones and present them with a compelling reason to do business with you. That’s the real name of the game, and it’s harder than simply optimizing your site for search engines and waiting for the orders to come in.

The first improvement that Google has made to their local business center is the dashboard.   You are able to manage all of your local business listings, straight from your main LBC dashboard.  This is particularly useful if you are a internet marketing firm or a company with multiple locations.

The second improvement that Google has made for their LBC is the ability to monitor local listing performance, by incorporating analytics on each listing.  You can see the number of impressions and actions your listing has.  A action is defined by a key action on your listing like “Clicks for more info on Maps”, “Clicks for Driving Directions”, and “Clicks to your website”.

See what keywords and phrases searches are using to find your listing.

See where people are requesting driving directions from.

Like many other social profile sites like Linkedin, Flickr, and Facebook, Google gives your listing a percentage to let you know how complete your profile is.  This entices users to create as complete of a profile as possible, by adding not only basic company information but store hours, logos, videos, credit cards accepted, etc…

Along with all of these new features they also have other neat features like adding a coupon to your local business listing, bulk uploading multiple locations at once, and a tips/resource on how to create a complete listing.

With more emphasis being placed on localized search and the fact that Google is displaying 10 local business results for most local searches, it is extremely important to make sure your listing is 100% complete and verified with not only Google, but Yahoo and MSN.  The down side is that just because you have a complete listing, doesn’t necessarily mean you will show up #1 in that list of 10 local results.  Google places a heavy importance on your proximity to the center of the city that the user is searching.  Which means if you are trying to show up for “Raleigh Plumber” and your location is in a suburb, 20 miles outside of the city, it will have a difficult time showing up for Raleigh based searches.  Nevertheless it is still important to make sure that your complete is complete!

Anyways, this inspired me to give my two cents about what I felt were some of the main factors that went into good search engine rankings.

Overall I agree with the SEOmoz report.  Here is just a high level view of the main factors I feel are the most important.

Domain Trust/Authority: The most important factor that goes into ranking sites is your domain trust.  A website that has been around for 5-10 years will almost always be seen as a more authoritative site, if compared to a brand new site.  A lot of people are under the impression that if you create a site with good architecture, unique content, some relevant links…that you will be able to surpass all of your competitors with ease.  Keep in mind that domain trust is extremely important and that just because you have SEO’ed a site, that it will not necessary rank above sites that have been building trust with search engines for years.

Link Popularity: It is one thing for you to tell the search engines that you are a credible website, it is another thing for another website to say that you are credible.  That is why inbound link acquisition is #2 on the list.  Link building does tie directly into domain authority.  Gaining links from websites that are relevant and have high domain trust will provide more value to your site, than a non-relevant directly link.

On-Page Optimization: Having good on-page optimization is still essential for ranking well in search engines.  Some elements are more important than others.  The most important aspect and has been for years is having your keywords in your title tag.  Search engines still hold the title tag as the most important, however that is not to discredit the value of good site architecture, internal linking, keyword rich urls & anchor text, etc…

Fresh Content: Just because you added a few pages of new content to the site, that doesn’t necessary increase search rankings.  Content development needs to be long term, not a one and done tactic.  Blogs, forums, discussion boards, whitepapers, social content sharing, are all great ways of generating new content on your site.  Most importantly though is that your content is newsworthy and interesting.  If you just rewrite an article someone already wrote or write a piece of content just to try and get better rankings, you will not see the results you are hoping for.  Fresh content needs to be interesting, create buzz, link worthy, and/or  provides value to a certain industry or topic.  This type of content is what search engines are looking for and will reward a site for producing this type of content.